Irulappa Samy and the 21 Rams
In colonial India, the British passed the Criminal Tribes Act, which in essence, notified that people born into certain tribes or castes were criminals by birth. This piece of legislation gave the police power to restrict the movement of such tribes or castes, ghettoize them, and arrest them at will. In Tamil Nadu Thevars (constituted of Kallars, Maravars and Agamudayars) were listed as a criminal tribe in 1911. Thevars are considered a caste today. Anthropologist Susan Bayly writes in her book “Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age” that in the past groups such as Kallars and Maravas were ethnically diverse people from pastoralist traditions. They bore arms and fought in the armies of local chieftains. When the chieftains lost power, their army disbanded.
In a harsh landscape with few resources, these men resorted to banditry, even petty thieving, for survival. Adult males were required to report to the local police station for daily attendance. In some places, the men were even locked up every night. So it went, this cycle of crime and punishment, punishment and crime When the Criminal Tribes Act was repealed in independent India, things didn’t change immediately for members of these notified castes who, by then, had been stigmatized for decades. Ve La Ramamoorthy encapsulates the social history of these oppressed people in the short story “Irulappa Samy and the 21 Goats.” In this story, one young man from the Thevar community gets a respectable job, which signifies hope and change for the next generation. A bit of a fairy tale? No. Ve La Ramamoorthy tells me he has, in fact, written from life. What a story!
Irulappa Swamy and the Twenty-One Rams
By Ve. La. Ramamoorthy. Translated from the Tamil.
The salty breeze lulled Irulandi Thevar into drowsiness. The large communal thinnai he lay on brought its own brand of sleep. This chest-high platform was inside an open-air hut with a tiled roof propped up by four stone columns. There was a four-tiered kumbham, a sacred ritual pot, at the center. If your foot touched it, even by accident, you had to touch it with your fingers and press them to your eyes.
Bhadrakali, flush with the ground, had sprouted beside the eastern path. Because they feared the goddess, the young lads did not get up to mischief here at night. The adults were very strict in this matter. “Any lad who goes off with some woman in the heat of youth,” they said, “let him go to the pond bank, the well, or the haystacks. If you stray here, Kali will ruin your eyes.”
All day long, in this communal space, the men rolled dice, played cards, or engaged in a strategic game of goats-and-tigers. Irulandi Thevar lay on the south side, with Kandiah Thevar lying right by his head. Seven men were playing rummy along the north edge – among them were Irulandi’s son, his son-in-law, and Kandiah’s son and nephew. On the west side they played cutting-cards. Another group rolled dice, in full view of the fearsome Kali. At the feet of Irulandi Thevar, men were playing goats-and-tigers. The men were all related to each other by ties of kinship: father and son, uncle and nephew, brothers-in-law and so on.
Little boys, too young for cards, played the “crow-chick” game in the banyan tree at the Niraikulathamman Temple. They churned every well in the village to mud, with nothing but leaping and splashing.
Irulandi Thevar rested his head in the crook of his left arm. His right arm, which was nestled between his thighs, brushed against a few bumpy scars. And he began to recall how he had acquired these scars. As a younger man, he once led his men to steal goats in Kaulpatti. They had been caught. The cops at Perunali Police Station had dragged a hot metal rod over his thighs.
Kaulpatti was four miles west of Perunali. Its inhabitants were Telugu-speaking Reddimars except for the washerman’s family. The village had all the arrangements for a well-settled people: each house had an ox to do the ploughing. There were pens upon pens of goats, and huge haystacks all around the village. The village pond was like an earthen pot with a wide mouth. People would drink the water and offer it to their cattle, but no one could wash their face or feet there. This was a disciplined village that lived by rules, not a place which would tolerate plunder. One could not saunter in and steal goats without consequence.
Irulandi Thevar was, however, a brave man who could take on ten people by himself. The men who had accompanied him that day to Kaulpatti were no less valiant. Murugesa Thevar was a man who could beat back a whole village single-handedly. Kandiah Thevar, Nagu Thevar, Karuppiah Thevar, Muthu Thevar, Sundara Thevar and Guruswami Thevar were all brave men. When these men set forth with their stick-spears, even an army would retreat!
That day, after midnight, the men gathered under the banyan tree on the bare ground by the Vairavan Temple. It was the late-rising lunar phase, when the moon would show up after 1 AM. The banyan tree stood at the summit, rooted in the bare rock. The men would go out on a raid only if the omens were good – this was the custom. If the owl on the banyan tree leapt from right to left, it augured well for them. No danger awaited them. If the bird hopped from left to right, things wouldn’t go to plan. It would be best to turn back.
With their heavy sandals and black blankets, they squatted, stick-spears in hand, waiting patiently for the sign.
After a long time, the owl leapt from right to left crying ‘Keech….’
Irulandi Thevar got up.
“Vairavan has given us the go-ahead,” he said. “Nothing will go wrong. Let us proceed.”
They proceeded. There were more than ten people. The moon had risen by then. To get to Kaulpatti, they had to cover four miles of cart track, which had thorn forest on either side. Irulandi Thevar led the group. The men talked and laughed as they marched on. Wilderness. Darkness. If any of the men spoke or laughed too loudly, Irulandi Thevar got angry. Two or three streams crisscrossed their path – the silt was knee-deep there. When the men crossed a stream, they carried their sandals in their hands.
Barely ten steps after they’d crossed the Manipatta Stream, they came upon a snake stretched across the cart track between the wheel ruts, drinking dust. It was thick as a person’s thigh. Irulandi Thevar, who was leading the men, spotted the snake and halted two steps in front of it. Before the serpent could raise its hood and hiss, Irulandi Thevar stabbed it in the head with his stick-spear and threw its limp body into the thorn hedge. He kept walking. Huge tamarind trees stood like ghosts around the Kaulpatti pond. As soon as the tamarind trees became visible in the moonlight, Irulandi Thevar put his finger on his lips and warned the group to be silent, ‘Shush… Shush…’.
The men quieted their steps and proceeded. They would not go any closer to the village itself. Rajapalayam hounds guarded every house. If these hounds gave chase and caught the men, they would tear right into the flesh of the men’s thighs.
The village was sleeping like an abandoned old woman huddling in the cold. Leaving the village to the south, the men walked north of the pond. That is where the goats were – outside the village, in the woods.
“Walk faster, Guruswami Thevar-ey!”
To the north of the pond, just four fields away, they could hear the goats.
Irulandi Thevar swung his right hand forward. Everyone walked north.
Sundara Thevar suppressed the cough in his chest.
“Kandiah Thevar-ey… The sound of your sandals….”
Kandiah Thevar muffled his footsteps.
The goats lay sleeping. One of the goats sneezed. In the southern end of the pen, a goatherd slept on a rope cot, covered from head to toe with a warm blanket. There was a stick-spear alongside the cot; a dog lay curled under the cot.
“The dog is sleeping,” said one of the men in a whisper.
The men were hiding at the edge of the next field. Putting down their stick-spears, they wrapped blankets tightly around themselves. They tied their dhotis between their legs in order to move with greater ease.
“Don’t go south or west. Half of you go north; the other half go east. We have to finish this quickly.”
Each one gripped his stick-spear tightly. Half of them followed Irulandi Thevar to the east; the rest headed north with Murugesa Thevar.
When a goat kid whined, it sounded like a fresh palm frond being shredded. The goats just lay there making teeny-tiny noises.
Neither the goatherd nor the dog stirred – they were fast asleep. The men had gotten so close, they could see the color of the goats in the moonlight. Again, Sundara Thevar suppressed a cough.
‘Prr… r,’ a goat sneezed. The men stood within a ten-foot distance and assessed the goats. If it was a ram – great, there would be plenty of meat, but if the ram was too well-grown, one would have to run four miles with that weight on one’s shoulders. The men were waiting for Irulandi Thevar’s sign. The goatherd, who was lying on the rope cot, rolled over. The dog did not move. From the east, Irulandi Thevar flung the towel.
The men reached for the rams they had picked. Gripping the ram’s mouth tightly with the left hand, they snapped the larynx with the right – ‘kadak!’ Only the faint sound of the rams shaking their legs was audible. The strangled rams could not make any other noise as life left their bodies. The men then lifted the dead rams by two legs in each hand and draped them over their shoulders like towels.
The goatherd and the dog were still fast asleep. Holding the ram’s legs in the left hand and the stick-spear in the right, the men set off loping – ‘longu… longu’. They would come to the cart track after crossing the border of the third farm. Murugesa Thevar ran ahead. To the men, the warmth of the rams on their shoulders felt good in the chill of the night. They reached the cart track. No one was talking anymore. Their pace had slackened a little. They were now running-and-walking.
Muthu Thevar had not squeezed his ram’s neck right. ‘Meh… Meh… Meh…’ it started bleating. Muthu Thevar’s grip slipped. When the ram struggled, he let go of it.
The ram jumped down and continued to bleat, ‘Meh… Meh… Mmeh…’
Muthu Thevar quickly recovered, bit the ram’s larynx, and spat it out. The bleating stopped.
‘Woof… Woof! Woof!’
The Rajapalayam hounds in the village were up. All the goats began to bleat. The goatherd threw his blanket aside, picked up his stick-spear, and shouted in the direction of the sleeping village. “Thieves!! Thieves!! …,” he exclaimed. “Hurry! Come here, everyone.”
All the men with Irulandi Thevar ran on the cart path at a good pace. Muthu Thevar arrived last. There was ram’s blood on his chin. The lead hound had crossed the first field boundary. The entire village was up by now.
The people raised a din – ‘Hoo… hoo!’
Sundara Thevar gasped for breath. The men took their sandals in their right hand and splashed through the silt – ‘sadak… podhak…’ – of the Manipatta Stream. The hound was approaching the stream. It was just one field away. Armed with sticks and weapons, the villagers were running towards the cart path, shouting.
“Wei ra wei ra!”
The hound balked at the slushy ground by the crossing. It ran a short way along the south bank until it found a stretch where the water flowed freely, then swam across and chased eastward along the cart track.
By then, Murugesa Thevar’s group had covered a great distance. The Vairavan Temple banyan tree was their destination. At this pace, the men could reach this tree in the time it takes for a man to urinate. Once they reached this tree, which marked the boundary of their village, no outsider could touch these men.
The hound bounded on all fours. The Kaulpatti folks had crossed the Manipatta Stream.
“Wei ra wei ra!”
Once thieves get away with a raid, there is no stopping them. A village that lets such things pass can no longer call itself orderly. Until now, thefts had happened only in the next village or the one after; this was the first time thieves had come to Kaulpatti. The women of Kaulpatti wanted to keep things that way. Without even pausing to tie their long hair, they tucked in their saris and went in pursuit of the intruders.
“Wei ra wei ra!”
The hound seized the dhoti of Muthu Thevar, who had lingered. When Muthu Thevar raised his sandal and smacked the hound’s mouth, it let go of the dhoti and hung on to his blanket instead. Muthu Thevar dropped his sandals and the ram he was carrying. He also shook off his blanket but held on to his stick-spear. The hound tore at his chest. He struck the hound’s face with his left hand and raised the stick-spear. Immediately, the hound seized his right wrist. Muthu Thevar could not pull it away. His stick-spear slipped and fell. With his left hand, he grabbed the hound’s upper jaw and pushed down on his right hand, which was caught in its mouth. Stunned, the hound fell into a nearby thorn hedge.
Before Muthu Thevar could bend down to pick up the stick-spear, the hound leapt onto his back. He toppled over.
The men who had gone ahead had covered quite a distance. The villagers were getting closer.
“Wei ra wei ra!”
In the moonlight one could see the crowd approaching. Muthu Thevar flipped the hound over, and it clawed his body as it went. He rolled with it into the thorn hedge, where the thorns slashed him in great strips. With one more roll he got back onto the cart track, but the hound lay on top of him, its mouth dripping with blood. Muthu Thevar put both hands inside the hound’s mouth and tore its jaw apart. With a heavy thud, the hound slumped onto its back. Muthu Thevar’s mouth, hands, and body were now covered with blood.
“Wei ra wei ra!”
The crowd was gaining on him.
Muthu Thevar got up and re-tied his dhoti. He draped the blanket over his wounds. He picked up the ram and draped it on his shoulder. He held the stick-spear and sandals in his right hand and ran. The banyan tree at the Vairavan Temple was close by.
The next day, the entire Kaulpatti village was at the Perunali police station.
The police rounded up all the men who had gone on the raid the previous night, as well as the men who did not go. With a heated metal rod, they branded the men, who writhed and screamed in pain. Each man got a lick of the hot rod in a different part of the body – cheeks, thighs, hands, neck, stomach, the back. It left a permanent mark on each of them. Irulandi Thevar’s scar was on his thigh.
When Irulandi Thevar rolled over – recalling the painful end to that nightly outing – his foot struck the waist of Nagu Thevar, who was playing goats-and-tigers at his feet.
“Stomp away, brother-in-law,” said Nagu Thevar, with a sarcastic smile.
“You must have done something good in your previous life to get stomped on by me in this one, maapley…,” said Irulandi Thevar. The corner of his lips curled into a smile. He drew in his legs and tilted his head to resume his nap. There was a dispute over the joker in the rummy game, and in the dayakattam game, a cry of glee because someone’s piece had been cut. There was also plenty of laughter all around.
From the east, Murugesa Thevar came up to this group.
“Aiyy… The late elder’s son, Sethu, has arrived!” he announced.
The men, who were playing, turned to look at the bearer of the news. Immediately, they stopped the games of cards, goats-and-tigers, cutting-cards, and dice, and woke Irulandi Thevar and Kandiah Thevar up.
Together, they set out to the elder’s house.
Sethu, who had washed his feet and face, stood in front of his late Ayya’s framed picture. Ayya’s forehead was smeared with vermilion. When Ayya had gone to rob the house of Kasinathan Chetty in Uchinatham by breaking through the wall, the people of the village had hacked him to death in the fight that followed.
Sethu’s mother looked at her husband’s picture. Next, she looked at her son standing beside her. She wept. Sethu too was blinded by a rush of tears. When he heard a small commotion, Sethu turned and looked at the entrance.
“My nephew,” Murugesa Thevar, who was at the head of the group, called out. Sethu came to the door.
“Greetings, Uncle. Greetings, Chinnaya. Greetings, brother-in-law…,” said Sethu. Everyone was overjoyed when Sethu came forward and welcomed them warmly, his palms pressed together in a prayer-like gesture.
“When did you get in, nephew?”
“Just now, Uncle.”
Sethu’s mother spread the mats on the thinnai. Everyone sat cross-legged.
“Have you joined duty yet?” asked Nagu Thevar. There was a scar on his cheek from that incident at the Perunali Police Station.
“Tomorrow, Uncle. I will join tomorrow.”
“Where will you work? Which police station?” asked Guruswami Thevar, whose scar was on his right hand.
“Madathakulam police station, near Palani.”
“You’ll be Sub-Inspector, right?” asked Kandiah Thevar, whose scar was on his nape.
“Yes, Uncle. I have finished a year of training, and this is my first posting.”
Those who were sitting in the far corner of the thinnai craned their necks to take a good look at Sethu.
“He’s a good one to wear the uniform,” one said. Everyone concurred. They were so proud of him.
“Where is your brother?”
“Mother vowed that if I got this job, she would make pongal and sacrifice a ram for our clan deity Irulappa Swamy. My brother has stepped out to buy a young ram, so she can fulfill her vow.”
Murugesa Thevar caressed the old scar on his cheek and said, “What…! Did he step out to buy a young ram? Crazy children! Our boy here has got a job as a Sub-Inspector. Shouldn’t we all celebrate together? Tomorrow morning, our clan deity Irulappa Swamy will be offered not one ram, but twenty-one rams,” he said, looking at everyone sitting on the thinnai. “Hey… From each family, bring one ram and tie it here, you rascals,” he said by way of an order.
“But why? There is no need…” said Sethu, looking at everyone with pained hesitation.
“Don’t worry, nephew. These are not stolen goats – these are our own.”
Tears welled up suddenly in Sethu’s eyes. A people who had been wounded all their lives.
“Thambi Sethu… These fellows have a wish…,” Murugesa Thevar began.
“What is it, Uncle? Tell me.”
“You should put on your Sub-Inspector’s uniform, sit down, and chat with us for a while…”
Sethu held Murugesa Thevar’s hands in his for a moment.
“I’ll be right back, Uncle,” said Sethu, and went inside. All of them kept looking at the inner entrance.
After a little while, Sethu emerged near the thinnai in his Sub-Inspector uniform. At the sight of his attire, the men scrambled to their feet and picked up the towels from their shoulders. Holding them in their hands, they stepped down from the thinnai and stood below.
Glossary
- Thinnai: a raised verandah platform.
- Kumbham: a sacred pot used in ritual.
- Thevar: a caste title used after men’s names.
- Maapley: a teasing, affectionate address between brothers-in-law.
- Ayya: father. Chinnaya: uncle or respected elder.
- -ey: a calling particle, as in “Guruswami Thevar-ey!”
- Aiyy: an exclamation of address.
- Wei ra: a shout of pursuit made up by the author.
- Thambi: a term of affection for a younger man.
- Dayakattam: a dice-and-board game. Goats-and-tigers (aadu puli): a board game. Cutting-cards (vettuchittu): a card game.
- Pongal: a rice dish offered to a deity.